


Heaven, When You Call

by MoonlightShines (Thatkillervibe)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers Family, Bucky Barnes & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky is so in love, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The First Avenger, Cold War, Cryogenics, Depressed Steve, F/M, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Kinda, M/M, Old Age, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Second Person, Pining, Supersoldiers don't age, and the 70s, both survive wwii, married, sorta - Freeform, the 50s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 11:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14260164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thatkillervibe/pseuds/MoonlightShines
Summary: He was strong, your soldier. Your strong stoic soldier. But this wasn’t something he could swallow like a pill without water. This wasn’t something someone could push through without staggering. This was Steve outliving his son.In which Bucky and Steve survive WWII.





	Heaven, When You Call

**Author's Note:**

> Really, I know we're all going to cry during Infinity War, so why am I writing angst now?? Don't ask me, I don't know.

"He’s gone,” Steve whispers, brokenly. The room is dark. He’s huddled, folded in on himself with his knees drawn to his chest, backed against the corner, head in his hands.

 

You walk with slow, steady steps, until you’re dropping on your knees in front of him.

 

Steve looks up at you, eyes red and dilated. He looks—He looks how you look. Youthful, fresh-faced, beautiful. Nowhere near old enough to be suffering this fate.

 

You knew it hasn’t yet sunken in for Steve. Not when he got the phone call, not when Caroline called him. Not when he was at the hospital. Not when the doctor came out of the OR in his wrinkled scrubs, sweat beneath his brow. Not when Tony threw up, not when  _you_  threw up. Not when Natasha’s chin trembled and she fought so hard to keep the terror off her face for you. Not when Vision bowed his head, his synthetic voice laced with sympathetic softness.

 

Certainly not during the funeral, when he spoke on camera, held himself together and spoke on camera, a speech he never wanted to practice, a speech he never should’ve had to prepare. But he did not speak as though it was rehearsed, it was nothing like the reels from 1942, selling war bonds. Steve’s words were tangled from the roots of his soul, he could speak about his darling Jamie all day. How Steve did that you have no fucking clue.

 

He was strong, your soldier. Your strong stoic soldier. But this wasn’t something he could swallow like a pill without water. This wasn’t something someone could push through without staggering. This was Steve outliving his son.

 

“He’s gone,” Steve says again and you have to catch him as he falls against you, trembling. You are wrought with grief yourself, but you know it couldn’t be as bad—Impossible to be as devastated as him.

 

“Hey, hey,” you console him, shushing him, grabbing a fistful of his hair fiercely to your chest, “I know,” you say, as Steve sobs, and you’re clutching him so tightly, it would crush an ordinary man. “I know, doll.”

 

You feel choked up, barely put together yourself.

 

“Buck,” he says, “Buck, I don’t think I can—“

 

And you drag your flesh hand from his hair to his mouth, covering it as a sound escapes from you, a high pitched embarrassing whimper of a thing, but you do not care, you don’t care.

 

“No,” you say, vehemently, downright dangerous, and Steve shudders, “No, never, not once, Steve, don’t you—“ and Steve sobs harder, and you have to lock your chin over his head, to muffle the sound of his cries into your neck. “Don’t you ever.”

 

You’re rocking him. You are balancing on the balls of your feet, crouched to give you height, leverage against his muscle mass. You smother him against your body like you did in 1938, when you were all he had. When he was feverish, when he was cold, when he was deathly, but above all, tangled between his bedsheets when he was yours.

 

You are all he has.

 

You are not all he has. He has his daughter-in-law Caroline, and his niece Sharon, and Tony and Natasha and all the Avengers. They are his family.

 

But you know that’s not the same.

 

You are all he has.

 

This was worse than Peggy’s death. Steve was desolate for three months after she died in her sleep, when they woke up to her monitors hooked in their room wailing, her frail hands clasped over Steve’s heart, cold.

 

But Peggy was old and dying for years, she’s been dying since the day they met her. They knew it was coming, Steve had her whole lifetime to brace himself for the moment.

 

Peggy held on valiantly, you whispered into her ear in 2007,  _but it was time for your peace, babygirl,_ you told her, _don’t be afraid, you can let go._ You told her you would protect Steve and their baby who was not at all a baby anymore with every strong bone in your body, which was all of them. You would protect them even with the parts that were not bone, but metal grafts and plates, as if Steve were his husband and Jamie were his son.

 

Her memory was failing her and she was oftentimes confused. You couldn’t blame her, it was the new century and you still looked not a day over thirty with a robotic limb. But she was lucid the day you told her this, and her shaking hands reached for your shirt and you leaned down closer.  _Marry him,_ she told you, in her rasping voice.  _Darling, marry our boy, he needs you, he needs you beside him after I’m gone and he was yours before he was ever mine._

 

He was always ours, you said. He was equally, irrevocably,  _always_  going to belong to the both of you.

 

 _Promise me,_  she told you, and you found yourself speechless, grappling for words at the weight of her statement. It was not even legal yet, gay marriage, you hadn’t thought it would be in your lifetime. But you knew you would do whatever she asked. She could’ve hunted you down the streets of Brooklyn, a total stranger, giving you a pen and paper resembling a marriage certificate in 1937 and told you the same thing and you would’ve said yes, then, too.

 

You did not tell her you legally couldn’t, not even as Sergeant Barnes, not even with Captain America. You gave her some water when she coughed and you told her you will.

 

For all intents and purposes, Jamie was your son. Any child of Steve’s a child of yours. And Steve’s been your life partner since before you knew what love was. It was the easiest request of your life.

 

~.~

 

You remember 1953.

 

You do not remember everything anymore but you will never forget 1953.

 

You remember his chubby fingers reaching out for your face. You remember the gurgling noises he made as you held him in the swaddled blue blanket in the hospital Nursery.

 

You remember Howard closing half of the hospital wing just for Peggy, despite Steve’s protests.  _The director of SHIELD oughta deliver like the Queen she is,_  Howard said,  _This baby is practically royalty anyways._   _The spawn of Cap, pal,_ he said, clapping your back with an exuberance only a Stark could manage at four in the morning,  _The world doesn’t know what’s coming its way,_ and you had to hide your grin as you agreed.

 

You remember seeing him for the first time and thinking  _Jesus Christ he has Steve’s eyes._

 

You remember how full your heart felt, near bursting, like a semi-truck crashing into a brick wall. You remember the joyful salty tears streaming down your face. You remember stroking his soft wispy hair and thinking nobody could love as fervently as this.

 

And then you remember seeing Steve’s face, watching you with his son and you knew you were wrong. The wrongest you’ve ever been.

 

There were no words for how much Steve loved his boy.

 

 ~.~

 

You visit Sharon, Jamie’s baby cousin, who’s caring for a shocked Caroline because she didn’t have kids of her own. Sharon’s face is hard and steely, but determined.

 

“I’ll be okay,” she insists, and you believe her.

 

You help coax Caroline downstairs and out of bed for some calming tea. You watch her slow descent down the stairs, how her thick black hair is going grey, and you think,  _my god,_  with your heart up in your throat,  _my god, she’s next._

 

You kiss her forehead and tell her all the lies you’ve been telling yourself, because no, you wouldn’t know what you would do if you lost Steve, you wouldn’t be okay, not ever, if you lost your husband the way Caroline lost hers.

 

You almost did, for many years, or more accurately, he almost lost you, but you came back. You came back and it wasn’t like—and you feel guilty for this—because here you are comforting a woman who had no comfort to rely on, her husband was not like Steve, and she was not like you, near confident he and his love were immune to death—Or at least, biologically,  _far_ far from it.

 

“It’s Tony I’m worried about,” Sharon tells you, wringing her hands and you agree with her. Sharon is Jamie’s baby cousin by blood, but Tony was his cousin in spirit.

 

~.~

 

Pepper calls you. “I think he should talk to Steve,” she says. “He’s drinking a lot.”

 

“If he could,” you say gravely, thinking back to what Peggy told you about March 1981, how Steve behaved, when they thought you were dead. You do not want to remember those wretched ten years. “I think Steve would’ve already poisoned himself.”

 

It would not do good to see Tony yourself. Pepper does not suggest this and neither do you. You killed his parents. Your friends. In 1991. Tony has forgiven you. It wasn’t really you. You were nobody at that point. He has forgiven you even if he shouldn’t have. He knew you as Uncle Bucky for more years than he knew you as the Winter Soldier. Tony was the one who stayed awake, manic, after you were returned to your family, regaining lost pieces of your mind, developing the arm you wear to this day.

 

Tony loves you, and you love him. You loved watching him grow up into the genius he is, but he is not capable of facing you right now. You understand. Jamie was all he had left too.

 

~.~

 

You remember 1973, when gas was .93 cents and Jamie had just turned 20. He had wanted to serve in Vietnam just the year before and you sat him down in the Starks tennis field and said, “I don’t give a shit who your father is, you will not fight just because you think you have to live up to some expectation. I’ll tell you what your ma’s expectations are for you, to stay alive. It’s not worth it. Son, please.”

 

He teased you, accusing you of being a hippie, asking if you were considering getting mutton chops the next time you went to the barber’s. But you saw the relief swimming behind his big blue Steve eyes and you thought,  _thank god_ , because Steve never would’ve stopped him, if he said that’s what he wanted to do, but it didn’t get that far, and you thought  _thank god._

 

But by then, Jamie was a year at NYU and you were sitting in the Rogers’ kitchen table for tea with Peggy, reminiscing Steve’s little boy all grown up, as Steve went with him to rent his first own place.

 

“Thank you,” She said, suddenly very serious, her eyes boring into yours.

 

“Huh?”

 

Peggy twisted at her wedding band, “You are a selfless saint James Barnes.”

 

“What?” You said again, but she cut you off.

 

“You let me have him,” she said, “You didn’t have to do that. But you did. I know how much you love him, and I could never thank you enough. I just wish you hadn’t had to sacrifice your happiness—”

 

“Oh,” you said, “Don’t you worry about me, Peg. I am happy. I live down the road, I have you, I have Steve, I have our—your boy. I couldn’t be happier.”

 

It was the first time you referred to him as your boy in public, and your eyes skittered to hers for a reaction, but she was beaming.

 

“I suppose you’re right.”

 

The 70s was by far the best decade since the 50s, if you were asked. 

 

~.~

 

“Steve,” You say now. “Steve, baby.” His ragged breath hitches, and so does yours. “I’m here. Come on,” you encourage, as your voice wobbles, “Let it go, I’m here.”

 

“This isn’t fair,” Steve says, “How many more times, Buck? I can’t--” and you stare up at the ceiling in the dark, black room. Jamie’s old room. Where he grew up. Where Steve read him stories and Peggy nursed him and he naively sneaked his first girlfriend through the window thinking his parents would not know he was gone.

 

“You have to,” you tell him. “It’s the life we got.” But Steve clenches his teeth and you drop your voice to a low, gentle whisper. “But you’re not alone. I promise you I’ll never leave you alone.”

 

“You can’t—” He says.

 

You remember finding out the effects of the serum in Jamie’s genetics. They were not much. Jamie grew up the most handsome kid you’ve ever seen—No doubt his parents' natural looks had to do with it, but his ever-so-enhanced agility and strength  signaled the serum’s underlying effects. Jamie could pick up five more logs than the strongest man, perhaps be very successful as a tightrope walker, and win the 100 meter sprint in the Olympics if he ever tried, but that’s about where it ended. Steve would not say this out loud, but you knew that made him sigh in relief.

 

Or it had. Until Jamie grew and you and Steve stayed the same.  Jamie was 61. He looked his age, probably the best looking man born in his decade, but he was definitely 61. Tony is 48. You are 98.

 

You look thirty-three.

  

“I can. I will,” You say. You do not know how else to convince him. You do not believe it is possible today.

 

You do not like promises. You promised Peggy to protect her family and you failed.

 

You do not like promises and yet you promised her to promise the rest of your life to Steve after she died. You had, you had.

 

So you do not like promises, but you keep on making them.

 

“I swear on my life, Steve,” You say, and it gives little comfort, you know, because your lives are going to be so long which only means you two will have to keep on doing this. One day it will be Caroline, then Bruce and Tony and then Clint and you cannot dare to think anymore.

 

“What do you want?” You ask him. You would do anything to give Steve what he wants. You know what he wants.

 

“I want my boy,” he cries, splinting the floorboards at the intensity his flying hands knock  against the aged wood as he covers his mouth with a gasping sob and collapses. This time Steve is inconsolable.

 

You call Sam over and you ask him to bring a sedative. He is a new friend of Steve’s. A good one, and Bucky is glad he sees him as a brother and not another son. It would do him good, to make younger friends. You are glad.

 

Sam asks you if you need food. The two of you eat like elephants, and Steve’s not going to want to touch a plate tonight, you already know, but you’re ravenous yourself and Sam’s a great cook so you nod your head.

 

In 1943, you would swear at a man for offering you charity. It’s 2015. You accept support for what it is.  

 

“We’ve been waiting for him to crack,” he says.

 

“I know,” you say, “I’ve been getting real worried.” They all have. Everyone was shocked at his composure at the funeral. Caroline nearly made herself sick.

 

They’ve been waiting for the ball to drop.

 

“It’s a long process,” Sam says, and you give him a sidelong glance. He was not around when Peggy died in 2009. Sam doesn’t know Steve like this.

 

“I know what I’m doing”  you say, tired not defensive, “But it’s nice to have you here.”  

 

Sam claps you on the back, squints at you and says, “He was your son too, wasn’t he?” 

 

“Of course he’s my son,” you snap, “He’s my step-son. Has been for the last four years.”

 

“You know that wasn’t what I meant.”

 

You stutter. You don’t know why you stutter, but you do. “Who do you think fought next to Steve in 1991 to get me back home?”

 

 

~.~

 

The flood of sudden memories you thought were lost nearly cripple you, and you understand now, the ferocity of Steve’s grief. Why he locked himself in Jamie’s bedroom and shut off the lights.

 

~.~

 

The guilt is worse, when you visit Natasha.

 

You raised Natasha in Russia.

 

You never remembered until much later, but she always remembered you. She was your Natalia, barely ten years old.  _Your star pupil_ , she’d say with a brag, but the way she fights with her hands, you knew she bore truth. You were the only one who taught her how to survive without brutality, without scarring her delicate mind.

 

The very moment a glimpse of her sharp red hair came back to you in 1998, you wrangled together spry young Barton and Steve to find her. She saw Clint first. She followed him to you, and you will never forget the way she flung herself at you, the way a teenager would after running away from home. It was the only time you’ve ever seen her act her age. You knew, logically, that she was a kid, all those years ago in the Red Room, but you could never fathom how much so, until she looked up at you, in that moment.

 

She'd call you her father, if she did that sort of thing. She never called you that, but you both knew.

 

It warmed your chest like no other, having a daughter that was all yours. Who knew you, all of you, the some of you Steve didn’t and you weren’t sure of.

 

You are remorseful, going to her to couch to sleep against her as you weep, and she cries too, now that she is in private, mourning her foster brother. You are remorseful because it is this connection you have with Natasha you take for granted, that Steve lost. And you are remorseful because you know one day this will come for you too.

 

~.~

 

“Barnes,” Dr. Strange says, his voice pinched. And you already know what he’s going to say.

 

You flew all the way to Chiang Mai.

 

To be truthful with yourself, you knew what he was going to say before you got onto the jet.

 

“Stephen,” You plead, and you are shocked at the desperate break in your voice. Even more so at using his first name. Dr. Strange was not your Steven. The name felt foreign on your tongue to call a different man.

 

“There are some fixed points in time,” he starts, sitting at a table across from you in a busy street, but he squints at the sun and hesitates, and seems to change his mind. He folds his weird floating cloak behind him. You stare down into your bowl of Khao Pad.

“What would you have me do?” He asks, gentler, no longer sounding condescending with his Sorcerer Supreme voice. “He was an ageing man. If I go back with the time stone, you might relive your entire life the way it has already gone. What would change? You do not know. You will get more time, but it’s time you’ve already had and you won’t be aware of it. Your life may be infinitely times worse there than it is here. What I do doesn’t matter, Sergeant Barnes, Captain Rogers’ son is still a mortal, non-enhanced man. That is something I cannot fix.”

 

 He’s lying.

 

“Then fix us,” you say, and you are even more surprised. You did not know you were thinking this until the words tumbled out of your mouth. “Fix us,” you say, “Please, can’t you do something? It’s  _killing_ him.”

 

The way Dr. Strange looks at you confirms your suspicions. He is a wise, knowledgeable man. He knows the cosmos,how the world works like no other. He could do it. He could do it with a snap of his fingers.

 

But he doesn’t want to.

 

“The world needs you, Bucky,” Dr. Strange says. “The world needs Captain Rogers. It needs us all. It is not time for us to go.”

 

“Fuck you,” you spit, throwing your napkin on the table, but you know he’s right.

 

You get back on your Quinjet without saying goodbye.

 

You know he’s right.

 

~.~

You show up home empty handed. You do not have Jamie with you to give Steve— You have nothing to offer him but yourself.

 

You climb into bed and drape an arm over his sleeping form.

 

“I’m sorry,” you say, to Steve, to Peggy, to Jamie. To Howard and Maria, only two of the dozens you’ve killed, but the ones of them you cared most for, and will never not regret. To Tony and Caroline and Sharon and maybe even a little bit to yourself.

 

“Hmm?” Steve shifts, you should’ve known the dip in the bed would wake him up. He turns to you, running his knuckles against your bearded face.

 

“I’d do anything,” you say, “to bring him back—Or to go back, you know that right? Anything.”

 

Steve frowns. “What did you do?”

 

He knows you. He knows you so well.

 

“Nevermind it,” you say, curling your flesh fingers into Steve’s chest. “It didn’t work. We can’t.”

 

Steve went silent. You watch him close his eyes and breathe in deep through his nose. You nearly think he’s fallen asleep when he opens his eyes again.

 

“I feel like I’m sinning, to say that in some ways I’d rather this, than watch him wither away like Peggy. I don’t know if I could’ve done that again. But still, I—There’s an aching hole in my chest.”

 

You completely understand.

 

“It’s no sin,” you say, “it’s no sin.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr @thatkillervibe!


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